Rob Savage’s Stephen King adaptation is visually compelling but narratively inert.
might be the quietest horror movie I’ve seen in ages. To an unsettling degree. While most genre efforts will occasionally drop the sound from certain scenes in anticipation of a big, shrieking jump scare, Rob Savage’s film, adapted from a Stephen King short story, lives in the silence. When the characters do talk, they seem to speak mostly in whispers.
But taken together — the darkness, the quiet, the inchoate beast of indeterminate origin — it all makes an effective visual metaphor for grief: No matter what we do, the darkness refuses to go away, and the monsters within it remain unknown and unknowable. That’s a powerful idea, and the rigor with which Savage sticks to his stylistic guns helps the film resonate, at least a little. It’s as if the movie itself can’t shake free of its sadness.
That makes some sense, as the central characters, the Harper family, have recently lost their mother in an accident. The kids, teenage Sadie and young Sawyer , have been understandably traumatized, a situation not helped by the fact that their psychiatrist father, Will , refuses to talk about what happened. Sadie has just returned to high school, where her friends’ initial sympathy quickly curdles into mockery and contempt in the wake of her testiness.
The vague characterizations and lack of any real dimension to the Harpers’ world might have worked if they weren’t so, so generic. (Cue all the “
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